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We awoke early on saturday morning, in true tourist style. I took my first photograph of the day by 9.20am, of Andy eating his very tasty croissant in a small café down by the quay. After breakfast we began taking photos for real. Heading to Temple Bar, Grafton Street and St. Stephen’s Green.
Walking really is tiring, so we found a nice bar called Sinnotts underneath the St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. Sat down, found free wireless and used their facilities whilst contemplating what we were going to select from the menu, not realising that it was 11:45 and we had to be at the Spire in 15mins for the photo meet.
We left the bar, grabbed an Abrakebabra on Temple Bar which tasted terrible, then met Red Mum, Ellybabes, John, Owen, Ryan, Gingerpixel, and Keith. We headed towards Trinity then off to St Stephen’s Green, via Grafton Street. I had never been on a photo meet-up before and really enjoyed it. Quite simply amazing. So many factors involved which I loved. Being with some great people, taking photographs in the street, talking blogs and general nerdiness - it doesn’t get much better.
It was all finished off with a few pints before myself and Andy headed to Wagamama on South King Street - he’s been going on about it for a few weeks, so we had to do it. It was indeed very nice, though next time I won’t go for the very spicy noodle soup with far too much liquid in a huge bowl.
The rest goes of in a bit of a drink fuelled tangent… the story will be continued later.
(Plenty more photos on my flickr stream)
It’s 2am and I’m on Andy’s lovely laptop in the hostel. Having spent almost 4hrs on the bus from Belfast we were pretty tired and in desperate need of restroom facilities, so grateful of the fact that we had to get a separate bus from the airport to the city centre.
Once we arrived we headed to a small pub by Trinity college called Bowes Pub where we met Niall and Aoife for a few drinks, before heading to the hostel, then to an Italian restaurant on Temple Bar for Pizza and wine.
After the meal we got back to the hostel where I continued to read Twenty Major’s book book which arrived in the post only this morning.
So far I’m enjoying reading it. There are some great one-liners.
The plan for tomorrow is to head to the Spire for a photo meet-up, get lunch/dinner in Wagamama then head to the blog awards.
I’m looking forward to seeing again the people I have met before. Not so much looking forward to constantly saying that I wish I had kept in touch better since the last time we met, and promising to do it this time. However, this time I really will try to keep in contact with anyone and every one I meet.
If anyone is up for getting drinks after, or before, provided I don’t drink to much at the event/it ends early-ish (not that I want that), myself and Andy are very up for that.
Hope to see plenty of friendly faces
The shortlists for the blog awards were released yesterday. A lot of fine blogs about. I have been shortlisted for best photoblog. This year there are a few others from Northern Ireland to be shortlisted:
Goodonpaper (Best Designed Blog)
No Clarity (Best Arts and Culture Blog)
Stuart Bailie (Best Music Blog)
Alan in Belfast (Best News/Current Affairs Blog)
Well Done Fillet (Best Food and Drink Blog)
Slugger O’Toole (Best Political Blog)
Unfortunately Gavin Mullan (headphoneland.com), winner of the best Photo Blog category last year, was not shortlisted.
Hopefully we can get a win somewhere. These are excellent blogs in the running.
Good luck.
So the long list of nominees has been officially released, just behind those “leaks” that spread across the web in the last couple of days. This year I find myself nominated for: Best Designed Blog, Best Photography Blog and Best Blog. I am very pleased about this, though I doubt I will win due to the great competition I am up against in each category, but to be standing alongside these great bloggers I feel honoured.
Not surprisingly, the number of blogs has increased significantly since last year let alone how much of an increase there has been from two years ago, with just far too many to count (at the minute at least).
I have my work cut out for me for the next month, the little free time that I will have will be spent catching up on the blogs I know and all those that I don’t.
I am certain that if I lived in a hot climate I would use the Internet/computer very little.
Over the past week I have been online very little. It isn’t very often that I take such breaks.
I spent Saturday until Tuesday at my grandparents’ house. I saw this as an opportunity to spent some time away from the internet. Besides the fact that I find it hard to use a different computer from my own, this usually leads to nothing getting done if I’m away from home. So it was a long weekend of photographing, watching tv and kickin’ a ball around the garden.
The ‘Titanic Festival‘ launched on Saturday morning at the City Hall, and finishes today. It was mildly interesting.
It took me quite a while to find the local blogging community, but find it I did; at Starbucks on Saturday afternoon. Someday I will learn how to cope in situations of meeting new people. Generally when we meet people we have some background on them, common interests often we know what they look like, but this isn’t the case when meeting fellow bloggers. Of course I could have done a little more research by actually reading their blogs.
As I said, I have only discovered the NI blogging people quite recently, though not long enough to have read much of what they have to say on the world, let alone figure out what they look like, so walking to the rendez vous point I was feeling a little awkward.
As I walked in through the door I was sure I heard someone say “Phil” but I just couldn’t be sure. Then at the end of the queue was Ed, the one face I knew (from his blog pic). The others had a table outside. Marc, Nelly, Hannah, Stephen, Dave. A good bunch. I found out a after a while that CyberScribe was infact present, though he tried to claim to be his very own stand-in. Naturally I didn’t believe this, but it set me back a bit and I just wasn’t sure what to say.
There is definitely an art to talking to intelligent people about such a wide variety of topics. It’s just not a skill I have.
Although I didn’t participate much other than my presence, it’s great to meet the fellow blogging companions, and to see that they are all very friendly. Now I have more people to add to my RSS reader and read and comment on and keep contact with and hope they read my blog. Its all hard work.
I am having much trouble with lack of storage space at the minute, and as I suspected might happen, I have been taking more photographs than I have space for. It certainly doesn’t help that I bought the wrong type of hard drive (doh!) so I gotta send it back and get another one. Hopefully I will have things running up to speed soon.
A few people were kind enough to offer some advice as to why I have display problems with Internet Explorer as mentioned yesterday.
Jennifer Farley said, “It happens to me when I place an image that is wider than the main column in the post.”
Im not entirely sure if this happens for me, but I always make sure my images are less than the width of the main column (about 470px).
nerd tells me “fixed width is bad” - I barely know what that is. I think is it something about how the width moves according to different resolutions?
The most interesting is that the tags could be causing the problems, according to McAWilliams. In his comment he included a link to the results of my blog after hit had been put through the W3.org XHTML Validator.
I’m not sure how valid this validator is though:
http://fustar.org - Failed validation, 28 errors
http://mulley.net - Failed validation, 33 errors
http://www.mneylon.com/blog - Failed validation, 35 errors
http://scobleizer.com - Failed validation, 41 errors
http://ocaoimh.ie - Failed validation, 45 errors
http://www.conoroneill.com - Failed validation, 55 errors
http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur - Failed validation, 67 errors
http://www.kenmc.com - Failed validation, 77 errors
http://www.tomrafteryit.net - Failed validation, 93 errors
http://words.iced-coffee.com - Failed validation, 140 errors
http://irish.typepad.com/irisheyes - Failed validation, 194 errors
http://www.adammaguire.com/blog - Failed validation, 418 errors
In response, the blog started out with a wordpress theme, which I have altered, but not much as any more just goes way over my head and I end up screwing it all up. I also write most of my entries using the Rich Text Editor. Could it be the Rich Text Editor?
I just noticed that my sidebar in Internet Explorer is way down the bottom of the page. As a Firefox user I haven’t noticed this before. The only time I use IE is in work; a more-shit-than-usual IE where flash, quicktime, streaming just about anything and much javascript don’t work. But my sidebar is at the top where it should be.
If anyone else sees the blog like this let me know. Then get Firefox!
If you can help me fix this, that would be super great!
Updated:
I gotta make sure I don’t have any media on the blog wider than 460px. Turns out that was the cause of the problems. That bloody Penguin! It was 470px.
Apparently Rocketboom.com is contemplating charging users to to view the show. Show producer Andrew Baron believes that going down this path with bring in much more money than the show currently makes. That’s probably very true. What I have a problem with is the whole ‘paying’ thing.
When you have 350,000 views a day and 200,000 downloads a day there is a lot of potential for rolling in the big bucks. Currently Rocketboom charges $60,000 for a weeks worth of advertising. $60,000! But they need more. They want to charge the users! Surely thats just not right.
Cannot they not be satisfied with the amount being made from advertisers. One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that the vast majority of it is free. Particularly a these new community and social aspects of the web; blogs, video blogs, and podcasts. They are all free.
Baron recently said, “Another way to monetize your content is a premium subscription. For the hardcore fans, we will give you extra content and our newsletter, and ask them to pay $3.50 a month. For 10,000 people that is $35,000 per month.”
Plenty of people will probably do it, $3.50 is not much for 30 shows.
I don’t often paying for content on the internet when I can get it for free somewhere else, which is often the case. Not so good for advertisers and busines, but thats just the way of the world.
I’m beginning to think it could be time to start videoblogging!
I won’t be paying, though admittedly I’m definitely not a hardcore fan. Will you?
The rumours that Twenty Major had scored a two-book deal with Hodder Headline as started by Sinéad Gleeson on Wednesday night were today confirmed by the man himself in a post entitled “So, this whole book thing“. As if being two-time ‘Best Blog‘ winner isn’t enough.
The press release reads:
“His two-book deal will see a major expansion in the escapades of Twenty and his pals Jimmy the Bollix, Stinking Pete, Ron the Barman, Splodge, Lucky Luciano and Dirty Dave, as they wind their way around Dublin’s backstreets as they try to find out who killed their friend Jim of Vinyl Records. Music, films, television and books will all be parodied and nothing is sacred in this irreverent look at modern Dublin.”
I had (honestly) been thinking of making public my thoughts on this sooner; that someone of such talent, as shown daily, was bound to be offered the opportunity for his escapades to reach all of those without access to the Interweb.
Will the blog become even more vulgar, with vodka rather than milk with his cornflakes, as all writers do. In Twenty’s case, the more vulgar the better. Well done, ya cunt.
(image by UnLaoised)
I noticed a problem with the blog the other day; the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links at the bottom of the page seem to have disappeared. I think it may have something to do with my wordpress upgrade. I got my host to do this for me as part of their services include installation of software such as Wordpress, so surely they can update my current version too.The problem is that I think whatever they did may have made my ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons at the bottom of the page disappear.
Maybe its time for a revamp anyway.
Update
WTF - I don’t even have an ‘export’ tab in my ‘manage’ tab in my wordpress dashboard. Whats up with that!?
I hate computers!
Update
Problem solved - it was the fault of the Adhesive plugin, and because I tend to install plugins en mass its hard to know which one does the damage. Good to know I’m not the only one experiencing this problem too.